“I wrote an op-ed for Fox News seven months ago,” said former acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Tom Homan, “and I said if Joe Biden became president, we would lose the border. And it’s happening. The surge is already there.”

Last March, President Donald Trump signed an executive order closing the southern border to prevent illegal immigrants who might be infected with the Wuhan coronavirus from bringing it across the border with them. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention,” he said, “is exercising its authority under Title 42 of the U.S. Code to give Customs and Border Protection the tools it needs to prevent the virus coming through the northern and southern borders.”

This Title 42 provision became known as the “Remain in Mexico” policy, and it was fun while it lasted. But the executive order giveth, and it taketh away, as Biden has shown time and again by undoing virtually every thoughtful America-first policy of the Trump administration.

“The truth is, it’s almost 4,000 crossings a day … that’s 120,000 month, which is 1.4 million a year” said Homan. “Once Mexico stops adhering to Title 42, the numbers are going to be astronomical. And we knew this would happen, because all the promises Joe Biden has made and he continues to make. And you know, this isn’t by accident. This is by design. This is an open border strategy.”

It’s also an economically ruinous strategy for lower-income brown and black people, who are key constituencies of the Democrat Party and who are disproportionately affected by the downward pressure on wages that invariably occurs whenever cheap labor flows unchecked across our southern border.

Thanks, Joe!

Of course, the economic costs of Biden’s open-borders policy don’t begin and end with the depression of American wages. In addition, our nation spends untold billions each year on food, shelter, healthcare, administrative costs, and other goods and services for illegal aliens. And their numbers are enormous. As Stephen Dinan of The Washington Times reports, “ICE is currently monitoring nearly 1.2 million illegal immigrants who’ve been ordered deported but have not yet left the U.S. — and nearly all of them are still free in the community, the agency told a federal court this week, revealing the monumental task of policing them all.”

What are the odds that these 1.2 million illegals will ever being returned to their home countries? You tell us. Peter B. Berg, the acting deputy executive associate director (there’s a mouthful) for ICE’s deportation operations, said fewer than 6,000 people with deportation orders are actually in custody. The rest? Dinan continues, “Berg said of the tens of thousands who have been given a final order of removal over the last two years, less than 18% have actually been deported. He said the other 82% range from cases where migrants have appealed their deportations to regular federal courts, to people whose home countries won’t take them back, to ‘those who were not removed because of discretionary determinations.’”

Finally, there are the public safety considerations. As former ICE Director Homan notes, “ICE has lost 95% of their criminal targets they arrest every year, criminal targets, people convicted of crimes. … Now, the Biden administration says public safety is still important. Well, obviously not, because DUI is a public safety issue. Over 10,000 people a year die from DUIs. And if Joe Biden ever sat down and talked to an angel mom or angel dad, and I’ve met hundreds of them, whose children were killed by someone here illegally, over a DUI, [he’d understand that] they’ve lost their children. And look this this isn’t about public safety at all, because he says sex offenders are still a priority. But he hasn’t done a thing about sanctuary cities. … So this is disingenuous. This is a false narrative to the American people.”

And to those who would argue that illegals with criminal records are but a small fraction of those who cross our southern border: You’re wrong.

Last month, our Thomas Gallatin wrote about Biden’s idiotic 100-day ban on deportations, which he issued as one in a slew of Inauguration Day executive orders. “Biden’s order effectively prevents [ICE] from deporting criminal aliens. In fact, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that Biden’s EO blocks ICE from deporting 85% of illegal aliens it had in custody. Of the 185,884 illegal aliens deported last fiscal year, 64% of them had criminal records or pending criminal charges.”

So if you think Joe Biden and Kamala Harris give a rip about our country’s sovereignty, or its borders, or the safety of its people — think again.